In 1938, the year my mother left Germany for good and never saw her parents again, Virginia Woolf published a book entitled Three Guineas. It was about how women could prevent war.

Virginia Woolf's name is not normally associated with great affairs of state, of course. Quite the reverse. She regarded them with a fastidious disgust, as a vulgar distraction from the true business of life: attendance to the finer nuances of one's own emotional state. Along with the other members of the Bloomsbury group - that influential and endlessly chronicled little band of British aesthetes of which she was a moving spirit - she was dedicated to the proposition that beings as sensitive as they to the music of life ought not to be bound by gross social conventions, and that it was their duty (as well as their pleasure) to act solely upon the promptings of the sympathetic vibrations of their souls.

In a demotic age, however, their justification for personal license could not long be confined to socially superior types such as themselves. Before very long, what was permissible for the elite became mandatory for hoi polloi; and when the predictable social disaster occurred, in the form of a growing underclass devoid of moral bearings, the elite that had absorbed (indeed, revelled in) Bloomsbury's influence took the growth of the underclass as evidence that their original grudge against society and its conventions had been justified all along. The philosophy brought about the disaster, and the disaster justified the philosophy.

The Cambridge Guide to English Literature describes Three Guineas as an established classic - but a classic of what genre exactly? Of political philosophy? Contemporary history? Sociological analysis? No: it is a locus classicus of self-pity and victimhood as a genre in itself. Never were the personal and the political worse confounded.

The book is important because it is a naked statement of the worldview that is unstated and implicit in all of Virginia Woolf's novels, most of which have achieved an iconic status in the republic of letters and in the humanities departments of the English-speaking world, where they have influenced countless young people. The book, therefore, is truly a seminal text. In Three Guineas , Virginia Woolf lets us know without disguise what she really thinks: and what she thinks is by turns grandiose and trivial, resentful and fatuous. The book might be better titled: How to Be Privileged and Yet Feel Extremely Aggrieved.

The guineas of the title refer to a unit of currency: a pound and a shilling. Even in Woolf's day, no guinea coin or guinea banknote actually existed. It was purely a notional unit, used for transactions of superior social status, such as the purchase of art at auction, the payment of surgeons, or, as in this book, the giving of charitable contributions.

Virginia Woolf writes of three requests made of her for donations of one guinea each: the first by an eminent lawyer for his society for the protection of intellectual freedom and the promotion of peace; the second by the head of a Cambridge University women's college to help rebuild and enlarge the college; and the third by the treasurer of a society for the aid of professional women, to enable them to buy the evening clothes necessary to their status in life.

Three Guineas tries to show how the threat of war is linked to the condition of women. War throughout the ages, Woolf says, has been a male activity, and during those same ages men have suppressed women: ergo, if men cease to suppress women and treat them as equals, there will be no war.

My copy of the book is a slightly battered first edition that was once in the library of Michel Leiris, the French writer and anthropologist who knew Sartre and de Beauvoir. Leiris's annotations consist only of a list of three pages of special impact to him, written in the elegant hand of a bygone era, and small crosses on the top outside corners of the pages themselves - pages 62, 63, and 64.

And what do pages 62, 63, and 64 say? On the preceding page, page 61, Woolf begins her discursive reply to a request for a contribution for the rebuilding and extension of a Cambridge women's college. Where education is concerned, Woolf certainly does not want more of the same - the granting of the same opportunities to more women - having previously argued that all the education prior to the Great War did not prevent that cataclysm from happening, but on the contrary actually provoked it by fostering a spirit of competition among those who underwent it.

"Let us," she writes, "...discuss as quickly as we can the sort of education that is needed." Since the past has been nothing but a catalogue of vice, folly, cruelty, and the suppression of women, the college of her dreams "must be an experimental college, an adventurous college. Let it be built on lines of its own."

And what might these lines be? "It must be built not of carved stone and stained glass, but of some cheap, easily combustible material which does not hoard dust and perpetrate traditions." This is surely an odd architectural position for an aesthete to take: a position whose baleful practical consequences are, alas, visible throughout the whole island of Great Britain, where hardly a townscape has escaped being ruined by it.

And what, most importantly, would be taught in Woolf's college of dreams? "Not the arts of dominating other people; not the arts of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital." (Let us remind ourselves that she is talking of the university of Milton, Wordsworth, and Wittgenstein.) "The... college should teach only the arts that can be taught cheaply and practised by poor people; such as medicine, mathematics, music, painting and literature."

Woolf's ideal college - the kind that would prevent rather than promote wars - would not be in any way elitist. It would "not [be] parcelled out into the miserable distinctions of rich and poor, of clever and stupid." It would, rather, be a place "where all the different degrees and kinds of mind, body and soul met and co-operated". It would be entirely nonjudgmental, even as to intellect. Henceforth, there is to be no testing oneself against the best, with the possibility, even the likelihood, of failure: instead, one is perpetually to immerse oneself in the tepid bath of self-esteem, mutual congratulation, and benevolence toward all.

But Woolf would not let her opponents, or those who think differently, live in peace: on the page after the last marked by Michel Leiris, she gives full expression to her slash-and-burn concept of cultural renewal: "No guinea of earned money should go to rebuilding the college on the old plan... [T]herefore the guinea should be earmarked 'Rags. Petrol. Matches.' And this note should be attached to it. 'Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willows. And let the daughters of educated men dance round the fire and heap armful upon armful of dead leaves upon the flames. And let their mothers lean from the upper windows [before, presumably, being burned to death] and cry Let it blaze! Let it blaze! For we have done with this education!' "

She was nothing if not a great hater of all that had gone before her. What was the wellspring of this great hatred? No doubt some would say it was the sexual abuse that she was alleged to have suffered as a child at the hands of her two half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth: but the extent and gravity of that abuse is open to question and would in any case hardly explain (let alone justify) the desire of a famous and successful 56-year-old novelist to destroy civilisation in the name of preventing war.

And if by any chance it were the explanation, it would certainly not redound to her credit: for the conclusion that an entire civilisation needed to be destroyed because it permitted her sexual abuse is no better than the conclusion that the existence of any injustice demonstrates that all efforts to achieve justice are a sham. A self-pitying lack of proportion, far from alien to Woolf, was in fact the very signature of her mind.

Woolf belonged by birth not merely to the upper middle classes but to the elite of the intellectual elite. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was an eminent essayist, editor, and critic and the founding editor of the monumental Dictionary of National Biography. Woolf's uncle, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, was a prominent legal scholar and historian, jurist, judge, and political philosopher, who wrote a brilliant and still-classical riposte to John Stuart Mill's essay on liberty.

She grew up in a rarefied intellectual atmosphere in which it would clearly be difficult to equal, let alone surpass, the achievements of her elders. One way to surpass her father and her uncle in achievement was, of course, to disparage and destroy all they had erected.

As a female member of the British upper middle class, and one of what she called "the daughters of educated men", she felt both socially superior to the rest of the world and peculiarly, indeed uniquely, put upon. The very locution, "the daughters of educated men", is an odd one, capturing her oscillation between grandiosity and self-pity: she meant by it that class of women who, by virtue of their gentle birth and hereditarily superior minds, could not be expected to perform physical labour of any kind, but who were prevented by the injustice of "the system" from participating fully in public and intellectual affairs.

Her reply to the philanthropist who requested a donation to buy evening clothes for professional women vibrates with outrage that the daughters of educated men should find themselves in financial difficulties (which, in her view, should properly belong only to social inferiors). "Not only are we incomparably weaker than the men of our own class," she writes to the eminent lawyer; "we are weaker than the women of the working class."

For those who actually know anything about the hardships endured by the British working class, male and female, during the years of the Depression, statements that insinuate a superiority of suffering on the part of the daughters of educated men are little short of nauseating: but they would clearly appeal to the pampered resentful, a class that was to grow exponentially in the postwar years of sustained prosperity.

According to Woolf, women of her own class were so dependent upon men that for centuries they were incapable of having, much less expressing, opinions of their own. For her, "independent opinion" was indispensably based upon independent income, though later in the book she lays down criteria for the independence of income that are so stringent and rarefied that only heiresses could meet them.

Poor struggling Oliphant, for example, the Victorian novelist and biographer, came nowhere near meeting them, because she was obliged to earn money herself for the upkeep of her children. (Woolf suggested as a solution that the daughters of educated women should be paid a government subsidy, so that they might create works of art - or do nothing at all - free of all sordid monetary conditions.)

No interpretation of events, trends, or feelings is too contradictory or silly for Woolf if it helps to fan her resentment. Explaining the evident enthusiasm of the daughters of educated men at the outbreak of the Great War, she writes, "So profound was [their] unconscious loathing for the education of the private house with its cruelty, its poverty, its hypocrisy, its inanity that [they] would undertake any task however menial [such as working in factories and hospitals], exercise any function however fatal that enabled [them] to escape... [U]nconsciously [they] desired our splendid war."

That they might have been actuated by the same patriotism as the men who volunteered for the slaughter was for her an impossibility, for she denies that the daughters of educated men were truly English: like the proletarians of Marx's imagination, they have no country. "The law of England," she writes, "denies us, and let us hope it will long continue to deny us, the full stigma of nationality." As ever wanting it both ways, she complains at one moment of exclusion and at the next, that inclusion is not worthwhile. She is like a humorless version of Groucho Marx, who did not want to be a member of any club that would accept him.

Her lack of recognition that anything had ever been achieved or created before her advent that was worthy of protection and preservation is all but absolute. How, she asks, can we, the daughters of educated men, enter the professions and yet remain civilised human beings? - a question that implies that such professionals as Lister, Lord Birkenhead, or Marconi, working during Woolf's lifetime, were neither civilised themselves nor contributed anything to civilisation. By so contemptuously denying the achievements of the past, bought at so great a cost of thought and effort, she totally misunderstood the material and intellectual conditions that made possible her own life, with its languorous contemplation of the exquisite.

Patriotism is for Woolf only one of the many "unreal loyalties" against which she rails. Loyalty to school, to university, to church, to club, to family, to traditions or structures of any kind - even municipal pride - are to her the equivalent of Marx's false consciousness. The only clue that Woolf offers as to what she considers real rather than unreal loyalties occurs in a brief discussion of the Antigone of Sophocles: "You want to know which are the unreal loyalties which we must despise, which are the real loyalties which we must honour? Consider Antigone's distinction between the laws and the Law... Private judgement is still free in private; and that freedom is the essence of freedom." Louis XIV claimed only that he was the state: Woolf claimed that she was the Law. For Woolf, loyalty to herself was the only real, true loyalty.

One would hardly guess from reading Three Guineas that it was written at a uniquely dangerous historical juncture, in the shadow of a barbaric threat. It would be unfair to blame Woolf for lacking the prescience of the catastrophe to come that many other people lacked: though she had had the advantage of seeing the virulence of the Nazis firsthand when she toured Hitler's Germany with her Jewish husband, whom the Foreign Office had advised not to go, as his safety could not be assured. But all that the experience taught her was that English society - with its unfairness toward women, especially the daughters of the educated class - was proto-Nazi, if not worse. At least the Nazis had the courage of their brutality and were not hypocrites, like the English.

Thus, when a man wrote to a newspaper to suggest that the employment of women was a cause of mass unemployment among men, and that the real place of women was in the home, Woolf compares the letter writer's views on the subject with those of Hitler. She continues: "But where is the difference? Are they not both saying the same thing? Are they not both the voice of Dictators, whether they speak English or German, and are we not all agreed that the dictator when we meet him abroad is a very dangerous as well as a very ugly animal. And he is here among us, raising his ugly head, spitting his poison, small still, curled up like a caterpillar on a leaf, but in the heart of England. And is not the woman who has to breathe that poison and to fight that insect, secretly and without arms, in her office, fighting the Fascist or the Nazi as surely as those who fight him with arms in the limelight of publicity?"

Her inability to distinguish metaphor from the literal truth is unremitting. Discussing the struggle for female emancipation, she says: "It is true that the combatants did not inflict flesh wounds; chivalry forbad; but you will agree that a battle that wastes time is as deadly as a battle that wastes blood."

As deadly? Over and over she lets her rage and resentment blind her. In reply to the lawyer who asks her for a contribution to promote peace, she writes: "The whole iniquity of dictatorship, whether in Oxford or Cambridge, in Whitehall or in Downing Street, against Jews or against women, in England or in Germany, in Italy or in Spain, is now apparent to you." In other words, there is no relevant difference between the defects of Britain and those of Germany, or between the Garrick Club (which still admits no women members) and Treblinka.

Referring to the dictator Creon in Sophocles' Antigone, she writes, "And he shut [Antigone] not in Holloway [the women's prison to which suffragettes who broke the law were briefly sent] or in a concentration camp, but in a tomb." Holloway equals a concentration camp: Woolf's signature mode of argument.

So what, in Woolf's opinion, should women actually do if war with Germany came? Since it was evidently a matter of indifference if the Nazis won (every British male being already a virtual Nazi), the answer was obvious to Woolf: they should do nothing.

"Their first duty... would be not to fight with arms... Next they would refuse... to make munitions or nurse the wounded [because the prospect of being nursed if wounded would give men a perverse incentive to fight]... [T]he next duty to which they would pledge themselves [would be] not to incite their brothers to fight, or to dissuade them, but to maintain an attitude of complete indifference." And she commended as wise and courageous the mayoress of the London suburb of Woolwich, who made a speech in December 1937, in which she said that she "would not even so much as darn a sock to help in a war".

Well, war came-as it happens, not so very long after Woolf wrote her book and my mother arrived in England. Strangely enough, my mother, who was 17 at the time (about 40 years younger than Woolf) and who had been denied an education in a far more forceful manner than anything to which Woolf and the daughters of educated men had been subjected, was able despite her disadvantages to spot at once the morally relevant difference between Britain and her erstwhile homeland.

Had Woolf's views prevailed, of course, my mother's life would have been a short one. Failing to notice the brutal dictatorship under which the daughters of educated men lived, she became a fire-watcher by night during the Blitz and a mechanic constructing tank engines by day. She did not refuse to knit socks.

Once the war started and the bombs began to fall (destroying the Woolfs' London house), even Woolf began to think that a Nazi victory might not be such a good thing. Even more astonishing, she began to see virtues in the very people whom previously she had only disdained. Writing to the composer Ethel Smyth in 1940, she said: "What I'm finding odd and agreeable and unwonted is the admiration this war creates - for every sort of person: chars, shopkeepers, even more remarkably, for politicians - Winston at least - and the tweed-wearing, sterling dull women here... with their grim good sense."

Eventually, Woolf must have wondered from what deep source the virtues she noticed had arisen - or could they have been present all along and she had failed to notice them? Might the revelation by the war of the utter frivolity of her previous attitudinising have contributed to her decision to commit suicide? If the good life is a matter of judgment, the war proved that all her adult life she had none. My mother, with her wrench by day and helmet by night, did more for civilisation (a word that Woolf enclosed in quotation marks in Three Guineas, as if did not really exist) than Woolf had ever done, with her jewelled prose disguising her narcissistic rage.

Had Woolf survived to our time, however, she would at least have had the satisfaction of observing that her cast of mind - shallow, dishonest, resentful, envious, snobbish, self-absorbed, trivial, philistine, and ultimately brutal - had triumphed among the elites of the western world.